Employment for People with Disabilities

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I commend the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) and the other hon. Members who have spoken in today’s debate. Between Cornwall, Northern Ireland and Scotland, the Celtic fringes have been well represented this morning. I just wonder where everyone else is.

We debated this subject in the main Chamber a few weeks ago, and many of the issues raised in that debate have been rehearsed today. I note the hon. Gentleman’s special interest in the lives of learning disabled adults, which I am sure we all share, but it is important that we have had a broader debate today. The hon. Members for South Down (Ms Ritchie) and for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry) made helpful distinctions between the different challenges faced by those with lifelong disabilities and those with acquired disabilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) and others set out the wider context of disabled people’s lives.

I still have deep-seated concerns about the difficulties that disabled people face in accessing the labour market and staying in work, especially those with more severe and fluctuating conditions. I have pointed out many times the flaws in the current system and how they combine to make circumstances extremely challenging for those who have to overcome barriers to employment because of disability or health conditions. Those flaws include the shortcomings of the work capability assessment; the failures of the Work programme; the devastating impact of the new sanctions regime on people who are found potentially fit for work or work-related activity but who cannot comply with the conditions attached to their ESA or jobseeker’s allowance; support being cut in people’s transition from DLA to PIP; and people’s income being reduced by cuts to ESA and work allowances.

Life has got a whole lot harder for many disabled people over the past few years. The support for many of those who are in work has been reduced, and those who are looking for work or taking part in work-related activity have been put under enormous pressure to comply with unrealistic conditions. Those who are not fit for work have too often felt themselves to be scapegoated or demonised as shirkers and malingerers and subjected to repeated and counterproductive assessments of their fitness to work. Too many disabled people, both in work and out of work, have experienced a lack of respect and understanding in their encounters with the state and have felt their dignity undermined.

Austerity has taken a very heavy toll on disabled people, yet there has not been much gain for all that pain. The rate of disabled people’s employment has been stuck for quite some time. I have previously been very critical of the assumption at the heart of Government that the support offered to sick and disabled people through social security creates, to quote the Chancellor, “perverse incentives” to keep them out of the workforce. There is no evidence that slashing the incomes of sick and disabled people helps them to find work. Quite the reverse: austerity has compromised the health and wellbeing not only of sick and disabled people but of the family members who support and look after them. Taking away the entitlement to a Motability car from thousands of people makes it significantly harder for them to sustain employment or to get into work. It reduces their options and increases their dependency on family members. Raising the bar on entitlement to support means that carers of those who lose benefits also lose their support but still have to provide the care for free.

I have met too many constituents with long-term health conditions who have fallen through the safety net of social security. Despite having worked and contributed for decades prior to the breakdown of their health, they have dropped out of the system altogether. Frankly, I am sick of referring people for church food parcels who should be getting better support from statutory agencies. There is recognition on both sides of the House that the UK needs to take a very different approach. The Government promised us a White Paper in the spring; then it was summer; then it was a Green Paper, and now the prospect has since been batted even further into the long grass. Yes, let us take time to reflect and to get this right, but we still need a timescale. I sincerely hope that the Minister will set that out today—this is a great opportunity to do so.

The consultation period ahead of the Green Paper gives the Government an opportunity to get disabled people around the table, along with organisations that represent their interests. There is a lot of expertise out there, and valuable perspectives on what does and does not work. For instance, Disability Agenda Scotland points out that the Work Choice programme has been far more effective in delivering results—sustained employment—than the Work programme and provides more intensive and extensive support for participants. A third of those taking part in the Work Choice programme delivered by the employability service of the Scottish Association for Mental Health find sustained employment, which is significantly more than for any other approach of which I am aware. Advisers have limited case loads and spend much more time with each person and with employers, and they also help people to apply for Access to Work funding.

In contrast, most of the emphasis in current programmes is on helping to prepare and equip unemployed disabled people for the workplace. If we want to secure a step change, the real trick is to prepare and equip employers not just to take on more disabled staff but to retain staff who become disabled or develop long-term health problems. Access to Work can play a crucial role in aligning the needs of businesses with employment programme outcomes, but it can also help businesses to adapt when a valued employee develops a condition that makes it harder for them to do their job. I wholly accept that certain jobs and certain conditions may be incompatible, but there are many, many occupations that can be sustained with the right adaptations.

This cannot just be about changing employers’ attitudes. Let us acknowledge that the take-up of schemes such as Disability Confident has been fairly low. We have seen some degree of cultural change in recent years in terms of flexible working, which has probably been driven more by labour market requirements than by concerns about disabled people’s employment rights. We should also remember that flexibilities have cut both ways, with a sharp rise in zero-hours contracts and more insecure and unpredictable working patterns. The hon. Member for South Down, echoed by the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson), made a good point about legal and human rights protections for disabled people, and those issues need to be part of our debate—they are perhaps more contextually important now than they have been for some time in the wake of the events of the past couple of weeks.

In general, large public sector and voluntary organisations have been much more successful than smaller employers in employing disabled people, perhaps because they are more likely to have professional human resources or occupational health staff in situ. It might also be easier for larger organisations to cover unplanned absences. The challenges of taking on someone with, for example, a fluctuating condition are likely to be far more acute for a small business or in certain manufacturing processes. Encouraging cultural change will not cut it if there are no resources to back that up. We need to make it much easier and more affordable for employers to do more to support their disabled staff and to keep them in work.

Small and medium-sized businesses in particular need cost-effective ways of managing and mitigating what they see as the risks of taking on staff with a chequered work history. Most jobs in the UK are with small and medium-sized enterprises, which will therefore provide most of the opportunities for disabled staff. The potential win-win for employees and businesses will be huge if those hurdles can be overcome, but there is a need to build confidence by improving concrete support for employers in the event that, say, someone with a fluctuating condition has a relapse or goes through a spell where they cannot work at full capacity. If employers do not have some means of insulating themselves from such unpredictable situations, we are unlikely to make much headway in reducing the employment gap for disabled people.

The last time we debated these issues, I referred to the Resolution Foundation’s recent report on the retention deficit in employment. The report makes lots of practical suggestions for policy change, such as keeping a person’s job open for up to a year after the start of their sickness absence. The model is similar to maternity leave. It would help people to stay in work and it could also be of huge benefit to people who are recovering from illness and who are expected to make a full recovery, but it will only work if, say, we reimburse the statutory sick pay costs of firms that support their employees to make a successful return to work. I hope the Government are seriously considering those recommendations.

The Resolution Foundation also recommends making early referrals to support for people who find that they are unlikely to be able to return to their previous job, which will be a growing demographic challenge. We should not wait until someone becomes long-term unemployed before making targeted and individualised interventions. For those forced to leave work, the loss of personal confidence and social contact often pushes them further away from the labour market. I therefore hope that the Government take all that work on board.

In the absence of a Green Paper, disabled stakeholders, disability groups, community organisations, carers, employers and, indeed, MPs are all scrabbling about in the dark. The process needs to be transparent and inclusive, and I hope the Minister will get it properly under way and set out a timetable as soon as is feasible.